substances and qualities. A good writer will not coil them up and
press them into the narrowest possible space, nor macerate them into
such particles that nothing shall be remaining of their natural
contexture. You are accused of this too, by such as have forgotten
your title-page, and who look for treatises where maxims only have
been promised. Some of them perhaps are spinning out sermons and
dissertations from the poorest paragraph in the volume.

_Rochefoucault._ Let them copy and write as they please; against or
for, modestly or impudently. I have hitherto had no assailant who is
not of too slender a make to be detained an hour in the stocks he had
unwarily put his foot into. If you hear of any, do not tell of them.
On the subjects of my remarks, had others thought as I do, my labour
would have been spared me. I am ready to point out the road where I
know it, to whosoever wants it; but I walk side by side with few or
none.

_La Fontaine._ We usually like those roads which show us the fronts of
our friends' houses and the pleasure-grounds about them, and the
smooth garden-walks, and the trim espaliers, and look at them with
more satisfaction than at the docks and nettles that are thrown in
heaps behind. The _Offices_ of Cicero are imperfect; yet who would not
rather guide his children by them than by the line and compass of
harder-handed guides; such as Hobbes for instance?

_Rochefoucault._ Imperfect as some gentlemen in hoods may call the
_Offices_, no founder of a philosophical or of a religious sect has
been able to add to them anything important.

_La Fontaine._ Pity! that Cicero carried with him no better
authorities than reason and humanity. He neither could work miracles,
nor damn you for disbelieving them. Had he lived fourscore years
later, who knows but he might have been another Simon Peter, and have
talked Hebrew as fluently as Latin, all at once! Who knows but we
might have heard of his patrimony! who knows but our venerable popes
might have claimed dominion from him, as descendant from the kings of
Rome!

_Rochefoucault._ The hint, some centuries ago, would have made your
fortune, and that saintly cat there would have kittened in a mitre.

_La Fontaine._ Alas! the hint could have done nothing: Cicero could
not have lived later.

_Rochefoucault._ I warrant him. Nothing is easier to correct than
chronology. There is not a lady in Paris, nor a jockey in Normandy,
that is not eligible to a profe